[mythtv-users] Plextor PVR Device?

[Brian Wood]

On Nov 24, 2006, at 7:22 AM, Jonathan Smith wrote:

> Does anyone have the ConvertX PVR card from Plextor working with
> IVTV/MythTV?  If so, how is the recording quality?
>
> http://www.plextor.com/english/products/TV402U.htm

IVTV does not support the Plextor, but it does not need to as it is  
not used with the device.

I am not using one at present but I have in the past. The recording  
quality was certainly acceptable to me, but there are a couple of  
limitations:

Myth only supports the MPEG-4 mode of the device, even though it is  
capable of MPEG-2 as well. This means that if you want to burn  
something to a DVD you will have to transcode it to MPEG-2 first.

This also means that certain F/E devices, in particular the MediaMVP,  
will not be able to play the MPEG-4 recordings.

This was with a 0.19 system, I have not yet upgraded to 0.20 so I  
can't tell you if the situation remains the same.

The device also does not encode the audio into the MPEG stream the  
way a PVR card does, it outputs audio as a separate PCM stream. This  
is because the chip used was originally designed for security systems  
which had no audio capability. This is no big deal as long as you are  
aware of it, but some systems, for legal reasons, do not have mpeg-3  
encoding capability and storing the straight PCM does take up a lot  
of disk space.